The trick of the 'Why?' question

Psychotherapy Cults are considered to be rare. The truth is not that they are rare but they are not easily recognized by the people who are seduced by charismatic or powerful leaders by their need to have their questions answered. Why do I feel like this? Why can't I get my life together? Why me? Asking why is a catch question. Playing on people's worst fears is the catch in this kind of con artist's answers, by telling people what they should do or what will be the outcome if they do something or what will happen in the future. It's terrifying, the power of the seduction of the therapist or workshop leader by claiming to have THE answer to another person’s questions. Intelligent, educated and professional people from all walks of life are manipulated into getting involved with a cult for many years, often without realizing that THE answer is never going to be revealed because 'the secret' provides an answer for the therapist or workshop leader, making them money under false pretences. An easy way to con people as who wouldn't like to improve some aspect of their lives? Go to one workshop and you end up being enrolled into other ongoing courses. THE answer, meanwhile, continues to be withheld and you have to sign up for more and more courses or therapy.

The value of the 'What if?' question

A private detective I happened to go on a blind date with once, discovered that my therapist lied about his name. Hearing the truth from my private detective friend made me think that everything that the therapist told me was the opposite of the truth. Everything that the therapist said had a ring to it, but it was not the ring of truth. Hearing the truth was unmistakable, as long as I asked why I felt bad, my childhood simply was not 'dreadful' as the therapist had made me believe, I had no answers that made any sense. Once I started asking 'WHAT IF?' the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. What if the therapist had lied about other aspects of his life? What if the worst possible imaginable scenario was the truth? What if the therapist was not a good man trying to help people, but a bad man deliberately harming his clients? Everything made sense this way round. When I stopped asking my therapist 'Why?' and answered my questions for myself I realized the answers were with me all along. 'What if?' became a key question in recognizing the truth and created one of the fundamental questions that helped me unravel the magnetic pull that kept me drawn to a mentality and way of life that was bad for me.

Without giving too much away, asking the question 'Why?' is not one of my five questions. When did you ever ask yourself why, think of an answer and then think, ah now it all makes perfect sense and move on to the next question? Of course there are times when asking ‘Why?’ does just that, so it’s not straightforward. That meant to me that there must be more to asking questions. As life has never been straightforward in my experience, I figured that my questions might bring more helpful answers if the questions I asked reflected that. The more I looked at questions themselves, the more I saw pictures. Hop on my train of thoughts for a moment. Asking 'Why?' started to look like a circle line, the answer didn’t satisfy so I asked again. And again. And then a few more times. I’d always come back to the same question. Asking 'What if?' opened up possibilities which meant I started to travel down new lines of thought and it lead to new destinations. It translated into making changes in my life. A much preferable route to take. ‘What if?’ plays a significant role in The Five Questions but there are more pieces to the puzzle.  

Patterns emerge through questions and the specific words used to put them together. It’s a fascinating subject, perhaps I should give it a name, but before you get on that train of thought, I am going to ask you to consider the following sentences for a moment... Jeni sees clues in pictures, puzzles and images all around her in her daily life. One significant image helps her to understand why she stayed with Rodney Stanwick for so long. The wobbly bridge. Rodney made the life of his clients ‘wobbly’ with his ‘therapy’. He was standing on the ‘other side’ to ‘save’ them. They were so grateful to have this therapist apparently there for them that they were fooled into thinking that they had a lovely man holding out the hand of love and they felt ‘in’ love. Wrong. Love would never shake you up to get you to fall ‘in’ love. He had shaken them up so much, they never noticed who was responsible for the wobbling ‘in’ the bridge or that they needed him ‘in’ their lives because he had made them feel insecure. If they had walked over a steady bridge they would have seen that he used his therapy back to front and who he really was, she saw was no less than evil, a Devil. The Devil, she, it or he would also go unseen in photos, pictures, puzzles and a map. Man made disguises to cover his trap. Images, paintings, buildings and people point her in the right direction. Bridging the gap between the unknown, the unseen and the unbelievable...

See how the words paint a picture? That’s happening all day long. The words we are using are painting our picture and the picture changes and mirrors the words we use. Something interesting happens when the words form a question. Is the picture painted by the answer or is the picture put in place by the wording in the question, making the answer a reaction to the words in the question? If so, our questions become the architect in our life. It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? I always thought that answers were key and that if my life didn’t change according to plan, I hadn’t found the right answer yet, so I was always searching for answers. Then I got sidetracked by relying on someone else’s answers rather than trusting my own which meant my picture started to be painted by someone else’s words. It’s like getting up every day and putting on somebody else’s clothes. That might be fun for a while if that other person was someone we aspired to be, but even then, there would come a point where we would want to put our own clothes back on. But it’s not as easy as taking off clothes and handing them back, another person’s words can be like a stuck record and our picture gets distorted by being played over and over. No change in the words = no change in the picture. If our own lives mirror our picture, what goes around comes around reflected back to us, then if we want something to change we have to look at what is making up the picture.

It never occurred to me to look at the correlation between words and the pictures they paint, but then think about this question, are thoughts are made up from words and pictures? What about this question, do the thoughts we put out, come back to us in some form? And if questions become the architect, do they lead to answers that are windows or walls? A whole new drawing comes to life with perspective. If you draw a house on a flat piece of paper, if there is no perspective, the view looking from one direction is one dimensional and effectively distorts reality.

The same happens in our thinking. I had been carefully taught to look at life from one view, in other words with no perspective, and my reality had been distorted. My life had become a flat picture.

It might not seem like the most obvious path to take, but drawing a three dimensional picture of the world I had lived in, breathed life into my flat picture. In The Five Questions, I wrote from my own perspective, then from a perspective where the line between what is fact and what is fiction is blurred, you’ll have to decide for yourself where that line is, and then you’ll discover that the whole drama is being watched by Jeni Carter’s guardian angel Edie and dead Uncle Peter. A rich tapestry of life as viewed from the afterworld. That perspective was about as far away from what I had known as reality as I could get. Pushing my train of thoughts to the end of the line allowed me to get a glimpse of a bigger picture. Seeing a bigger picture in my mind affected my life positively, because it taught me to look beyond what I could see with my eyes. Believing in the unbelievable. It was a skill I’d had as a child and when I was child and I believed that anything was possible it had seemed to open doors. I wanted to get back to that way of thinking. The things I chose to believe in made a difference. Again I think it wasn’t straightforward, there was more to it than just believing, but as I was writing my whole train of thoughts in my book the process opened other kinds of doors for me. I moved to a different country, changed careers and my whole life changed for the better. So while some people think I should have written my book a different way, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Drawing pictures with different perspectives in my thinking, enabled me to move past the point of being stuck in my life. If I took something I had been looking at for some time, without being able to see the answer, and picked it up and moved it or turned it around, I found that looking at it from a different perspective or view meant that it suddenly fell into place and I found that I had the answer all along, but it only made sense from the alternative view. I believe that we all have the answers inside of us, and solving the puzzle I found to be a whole lot easier when I put the unbelievable into my picture. Finding a balance between opposites, unbelievable and believable, good and evil, God and The Devil helped me to draw conclusions from my picture. It was like having a map, getting from A to B is easier when you can see the whole picture and you have the possibility of deciding which parts of the map you don’t want to go to, on your journey.

It seems to me that while most words have opposites, the questions “Why?’ and ‘What if?’ are balancing points and the answers can go either way, recognizing how to point them in the direction you want to go in, and where they might lead if you don’t, is the aspect I write about through The Five Questions. It’s a train of thoughts which is meant to open up possibilities, not give you a set of rules to follow. I will let you draw your own conclusions.

© Gena Dry 2006 All rights reserved